Random musings about London's history

Visscher Redrawn

2016 will be the 400th anniversary of Claes Jansz Visscher’s panoramic engraving of London. Pre-fire, it gives us one of the best ideas of what London looked like in medieval times and through the Tudor era. Incredibly, it’s almost certain that the Dutchman never actually visited our city. He was very experienced in this art form and it’s thought he used secondary sources.

To celebrate the anniversary, illustrator Robin Reynolds has been painstakingly recreating the panorama for 2016. In pen on paper, it’s the same size as its illustrious predecessor, taken from the same viewpoint in Southwark and including the same distortion and visual tricks that Visscher employed.